MET 654

Digital Image Processing and Analysis

AHMAD WAQAS
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF METEOROLOGY
CIIT-ISLAMABAD
USDA Forest Service, Remote Sensing Applications Center, http://fsweb.rsac.fs.fed.us and ENVS403

Lecture No. 2

DIGITAL IMAGE REPRESENTATION

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MET 654 Digital Image Processing & Analysis 1

 Lecture Outlines

 Digital Image Representation

 Intensity
 Spatial
 Digital Image Display
 Monochromatic display
 Color Display
 Pseudo color display
 Pixel Distributions
 Histograms
 Lookup Tables

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Digital Image Representation

 A digital image is a two dimensional array of numbers

 As a two-dimensional (2D) array, a digital image is
composed of data in lines and columns.

 A digital image can be considered as a discrete

representation of data possessing both spatial (layout) and
intensity (color) information.

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 Intensity Representation
 An image is a picture, photograph or
any form of a two-dimensional
representation of objects or a scene.
 The information in an image is
presented in tones or colors.
 Each cell of a digital image is called a
pixel and the number representing
the brightness of the pixel is called a
Digital Number (DN).
 The position of a pixel is allocated
with the line and column of its DN.
 Such regularly arranged data,
without x and y coordinates, are
usually called raster data
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Spatial Representation

 The two-dimensional (2-D) discrete, digital image I(m; n)

represents the response of some sensor (or simply a value
of some interest) at a series of fixed positions (m =1; 2; . . .
;M; n = 1; 2; . . . ;N) in 2-D Cartesian coordinates and is
derived from the 2-D continuous spatial signal I(x; y)
through a sampling process frequently referred to as
discretization.

 Discretization occurs naturally with certain types of imaging

sensor (such as CCD cameras) and basically effects a local
averaging of the continuous signal over some small
(typically square) region in the receiving domain.

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 Spatial Representation

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Digital Image Display

• The colors of objects are the result of selective absorption and
reflection of electromagnetic radiation from illumination sources.
• Perception by the human eye is limited to the spectral range of
0.38–0.75 mm.
• In digital image display, the tones or colors are visual
representations of the image information recorded as digital image
DNs, but they do not necessarily these images are not wider than 0–
255.
• On the other hand, many remotely sensed images have much wider
DN ranges than 8 bits, such as those from Ikonos and Quickbird,
whose images have an 11 bit DN range (0–2047).

• In this case, the images can still be visualized in an 8 bit display

device in various ways, such as by compressing the DN range into 8
bits.
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 Monochromatic display
• In a monochromatic display of a spectral band image, the
brightness (grey level) of a pixel is proportional to the reflected
energy in this band from the corresponding ground area.
• For instance, in a B/W display of a red band image, light red
appears brighter than dark red.
• This is also true for invisible bands (e.g. infrared bands), though the
‘colors' cannot be seen. After all, any digital image is composed of
DNs; the physical meaning of DNs depends on the source of the
image.
• A monochromatic display visualizes DNs in grey tones from black to
white, while ignoring the physical relevance.

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Color Display

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 False Color Display

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Pseudo color display

The technique to display a monochrome image as a color image is called

pseudo color display. A pseudo color image is generated by assigning
each grey level to a unique color.

An image in grey-scale (B/W) display; (b) the same image in a pseudo

color display; and (c) the brightest DNs are highlighted in red on a grey-
scale background
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MET 654 Digital Image Processing & Analysis 6

 Histogram

 Histogram is a graphical representation showing a visual

impression of the distribution of data.

 An Image Histogram is a type of histogram that acts as a

graphical representation of the lightness/color distribution
in a digital image. It plots the number of pixels for each
value.

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Why we use Histogram for image analysis

 Histograms are the basis for numerous spatial domain

processing techniques

 Histogram manipulation can be used effectively for image

enhancement

 Histograms can be used to provide useful image statistics

 Information derived from histograms are quite useful in

other image processing applications, such as image
compression and segmentation.

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 Histograms

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Univariate descriptive image statistics

 The mode is the value that occurs most

frequently in a distribution and is usually
the highest point on the curve (histogram).
It is common, however, to encounter more
than one mode in a remote sensing
dataset.
 The median is the value midway in the
frequency distribution. One-half of the area
below the distribution curve is to the right
of the median, and one-half is to the left
 The mean is the arithmetic average and is
defined as the sum of all brightness value
observations divided by the number of
observations.

 BV ik
k  i 1
n
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MET 654 Digital Image Processing & Analysis 8

  Min n
 Max 
 ik k
BV   2

 Variance
vark  i 1
 Standard deviation n 1
 Coefficient of variation
(CV)



Skewness
Kurtosis
sk   k  vark
k
CV 
k
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MET 654 Digital Image Processing & Analysis 9

 Look Up Tables

• An LUT is composed of DN levels of an input image X and

their corresponding DN levels in the output image Y; an
example is shown in Table in next slide.

• When applying a point operation function to enhance an

image, firstly the LUT is generated by applying the function
y= f(x) to every DN level x of the input image X to generate
the corresponding DN level y in the output image Y.

• Then, the output image Y is produced by just replacing x

with its corresponding y for each pixel.

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Look Up Tables

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 Suggested Reading

 Chapter 1, Liu and Masson, 2009

 Chapter 4, Jensen, 2005
 Chapter 2, Gonzalez and Woods, 2001

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Questions

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